Data centers are having a moment, and not always a good one in the public eye.

Across America, proposed facilities are drawing opposition over power demand, water use, land, trust, and growth. Those concerns deserve serious discussion.

But there is an uncomfortable truth missing from the debate: Data centers are no longer something Americans occasionally use. They are the physical infrastructure underneath modern American life.

Banking. Healthcare. Transportation. Communications. Entertainment. Commerce. National security. Social media. Nearly every convenience technology provides us. And increasingly, artificial intelligence.

We can no longer separate the lives we have built from the infrastructure that supports them.

Consider your average day.

Your alarm goes off at 6:00 a.m. Before your feet hit the floor, you reach for your phone. You check the weather, texts, email, news, sports, and maybe scroll Instagram or X.

While you slept, your photos backed up to the cloud, email synchronized and apps updated. Your thermostat adjusted the temperature. You turn on a smart light and check the Ring camera because something moved outside.

It is not even 6:30.

You have already started connecting to data centers.

You get in the car and open Google Maps or Waze. Computers process traffic and thousands of possible routes to shave six minutes off your commute. Spotify streams your playlist. You stop for coffee and tap your card. Within seconds, payment networks verify that you are good for $6.47.

Then you get to work.

Outlook. Teams. Zoom. Slack. Salesforce. Cloud storage. HR systems. Cybersecurity. AI. Even the badge you swiped to enter the building may depend on remote computing infrastructure.

Then hunger wins.

You open Uber Eats or DoorDash and order a burger or a salad. One tap can trigger mapping services, restaurant systems, payment processing, fraud detection, driver dispatch, messaging and real-time tracking.

All so a cheeseburger can find you.

The afternoon brings online banking, prescription refills, health portals, updates from your child’s school, FaceTime, Amazon, ChatGPT and Venmo.

Then you collapse on the couch.

Netflix asks if you are still watching. Of course you are.

Meanwhile, your phone, television, security cameras, thermostat and other connected devices continue communicating with infrastructure you will probably never see.

That is the strange reality of modern life: We rarely see a data center, yet we spend almost every waking hour asking one to do something for us.

Now comes the irony.

The hard-core anti-data-center activist can organize a protest through Facebook and Gmail, navigate there using Google Maps, collect donations electronically, livestream the rally, upload clips to TikTok and Instagram, then celebrate the turnout on X. None of that protest is possible without the very data centers they are protesting, yet they still manage to become puppets for Chinese propaganda aimed at slowing the infrastructure America needs to compete.

That does not invalidate legitimate concerns about power, water, land use, or responsible development. But we should stop pretending this demand is being imposed on unwilling Americans.

We are the demand, yet some oppose the very infrastructure their lifestyles require.

Every stream. Every search. Every swipe. Every AI prompt. Every purchase. Every digital payment. Every photo stored in the cloud.

And the stakes extend beyond convenience.

China has made AI dominance a national objective. But AI requires more than algorithms. It requires semiconductors, electricity, transmission, cooling, skilled labor, and massive computing capacity.

The AI race is physical as much as it is digital.

Today, data centers are the protest of the moment. Tomorrow, it may be the infrastructure required to power them.

Small modular nuclear reactors may soon provide the reliable, low-carbon power needed to meet growing demand. And when they do, do not expect the protests to stop. The same activists demanding zero-carbon energy will likely turn their signs toward nuclear power next, even when it delivers exactly the emissions profile they claim to want. At some point, you must ask whether the objection is really about data centers, carbon, or simply opposition to building anything at all.

Therein lies the larger contradiction.

We want more AI. More streaming. More convenience. More connectivity. Faster everything. We want the cloud to store our lives and electricity to remain reliable and affordable.

Yet we increasingly oppose the infrastructure required to make it possible.

Without question, we should debate where data centers are built, how they are powered, and what they owe surrounding communities. But that debate should begin with intellectual honesty.

You cannot demand an increasingly digital life while pretending the physical infrastructure behind it is somebody else’s problem.

The cloud was never in the sky.

It is a building.

Kirk Offel is a Navy nuclear attack submarine veteran and the CEO of Overwatch Mission Critical, a Texas-based Service-Disabled Veteran Owned data center company that trains and hires future leaders for high-skill jobs in the data center industry. He is a Top 10 ranked global voice on data centers.

Mike Sarraille, a retired Navy SEAL and former Recon Marine, is the host of Fox Nation’s “Man of Honor: The Michael Monsoor Story,” and "Final Flight: The Men of Extortion 17." He is also the Chief Talent Officer of Overwatch Mission Critical. He is the #3 Leadership Speaker in the world and author of two best-selling books, "The Talent War" and "The Everyday Warrior.”

Op-eds reflect the views of the author, not Hyperscale News or its sponsor, JD Key Government Affairs.